PhantomGrad

Advancing AI through rigorous research, responsible deployment, and real-world impact.

PhantomGrad is an AI research group at BITS Pilani, led by Professor Dhruv Kumar, a leading AI scientist, professor, and consultant in India. We work at the intersection of large language models, intelligent systems, and real-world applications — spanning foundational research on LLM evaluation, interpretability, and training, and applied projects in education, software engineering, environmental science, and beyond. We partner with industry, government agencies, and NGOs to translate research into impact.

Prof. Dhruv Kumar
Prof. Dhruv Kumar
Director, PhantomGrad
Asst. Professor, BITS Pilani
60+
Publications
5
Funded Projects
₹1.2Cr+
Research Funding
15+
Collaborators
3
Industry Partners

What We Work On

AI Agents & LLMs

Evaluation, benchmarking, and applications of large language models in real-world settings.

AI for Education

Intelligent tutoring, automated assessment, and understanding LLM impact on learning.

AI for Software Engineering

Code generation, test synthesis, type inference, and formal verification with LLMs.

Mechanistic Interpretability

Understanding internal representations and circuits within transformer models.

Multi-Modal Foundation Models

Vision, time series, and tabular foundation models and their adaptation.

RL & LLM Training

Policy optimization, fine-tuning strategies, and hybrid learning frameworks.

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News

Publications, grants, awards, and lab updates — latest first.

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BITS Pilani
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Minnesota
UMass Amherst
IIIT Delhi
NC State University
Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
University of Michigan
KIIT Bhubaneswar
IIT Madras
Trustwise
Birla AI
Disha AI
Google Cloud
Genquery Technology Services
The Nature Conservancy
WISE–IIE Higher Education Consortium